Peter Gertner

Fürst Leopold I von Anhalt-Dessau (1676-1747), Schloss zu Dessau;
possibly sale, Berlin, Aufseezer, Henrici, 1-2 November 1926;
with Paul Cassirer, Berlin, 1926, who dispersed the volume;
with Jacques Seligmann and son, Paris, 1928;
European Private Collection

Pantheon II, 1928, p. 365, reproduced p. 364;
L. Fudickar, 'Die Bildniskunst der Nürnberger Barthel Beham und Peter Gertner', PhD diss., Munich 1942, no. 107;
K. Löcher, ‘Peter Gertner – ein Nürnberger Meister als Hofmaler des Pfalzgrafen Ottheinrich in Neuburg an der Donau’, Neuburger Kollektaneenblatt, 141, 1993, pp. 46, 47, 53, fig. 27 

Laid down on board. There is a certain amount of light staining and discolouration, particularly to the edges. Otherwise in generally good condition with the medium fresh and vibrant.
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In the course of a few years, during the late 1530s, the Nuremberg artist Peter Gertner produced a remarkable series of highly innovative and extremely powerful portrait studies of his main patrons.  Executed on the same scale as the paintings for which they were studies, these modelli consisted of extremely rapidly sketched outline drawings of the sitters, bust length, within which only the faces, and in a couple of cases also the hands, are carefully worked up in finely modelled gouache.  It is thought that these studies were made from life and then kept by Gertner in his studio to be used as the basis for painted portraits, which could be produced in multiple examples if necessary.  Although other artists of the day, most famously Holbein, did employ an essentially similar working method, both the scale and the specific media used by Gertner in his portrait studies are highly original.  Around a dozen of these astonishing works are known, of which this fine, extremely well preserved example is one of very few still in private hands.   

Gertner’s habit of signing his works not with his name but with his initials separated by a small garden spade (referring to his surname) may have contributed to the relative obscurity in which he languished until the early 20^th century, when Max Friedländer first linked the artist’s characteristic monogram with the name Peter Gertner, and Ernst Buchner in turn made the connection with the ‘Hofmaler Peter’ who was recorded as working at the court of our sitter, Ottheinrich von der Pfalz, in Neuburg an der Donau.¹   The dates of Gertner’s birth and death are unknown, but he is first documented in Nuremberg on 12 January 1521, and dated works survive from between 1523 and 1541.  

Gertner is thought to have studied with the Dürer pupil Wolf Traut, who worked in Brandenburg-Ansbach, a connection that may have led to Gertner’s first commissions, which he received in 1521 (shortly after Traut’s death) from the Markgraf Kasimir von Brandenburg-Kulmbach and his wife, Susanna von Bayern.²  After Kasimir’s death in 1527, his widow married Ottheinrich, Herzog von Pfalz-Neuburg, and Gertner must surely have come with her to the Wittelsbach court at Neuburg an der Donau, where he worked as court painter in the service of Ottheinrich for at least twelve years.³  Ottheinrich was the grandson of Georg the Rich (1455-1503), the last Duke of Bayern-Landshut, whose marriage in 1475 to the Polish princess Hedwig is still commemorated to this day in one of the largest historical pageants in Europe, held once every four years in Landshut.  A series of deaths and a complex war of succession led to the creation of the principality of Pfalz-Neuburg, specifically for Ottheinrich and his brother.  His rule was chiefly defined by his overspending, and he was eventually forced into exile in Heidelberg in 1544.  Ottheinrich was, however, reinstated in 1552, and in 1556 he succeeded Frederick II as Elector Palatine of the Rhine (whereupon he introduced Protestantism to the Palatinate).   

Ottheinrich may not have been fiscally adept but he was a great patron of the arts (a significant factor in his financial woes), and he sponsored, inter alia, the completion of the magnificent, illuminated Ottheinrich Bible, the earliest surviving illustrated manuscript of the New Testament in the German language, which had been begun in 1430 but never finished.⁴  He also conceived a great gallery of family portraits, the Runde Stube, in his Neuburger Schloss, and entrusted Gertner and Barthel Beham with providing the contents.⁵ 

It is likely that the remarkable series of portrait modelli to which this belongs was originally associated with the Runde Stube project.  After Gertner’s death at least 22 of these drawings remained bound together in an album, first recorded in the collection of Leopold I von Anhalt-Dessau (1676-1747).  In 1926 the dealer Paul Cassirer acquired and dispersed the album.  Many of the surviving drawings are numbered, the highest number known today being 22, indicating that the group, now consisting of around a dozen known sheets, originally contained at least ten more.⁶ 

Perhaps not surprisingly, no fewer than three of the surviving drawings are portraits of Ottheinrich himself.  In addition to the present, frontal portrait, two other drawings show the sitter in three-quarters profile.  One, a full-size sheet numbered 14, was formerly on the Berlin and New York art markets, while the second, showing the sitter from a fractionally different viewpoint, was sold in New York in 2006.⁷  None of these can be related to Gertner’s first painted portrait of Ottheinrich, the splendid 1531 panel in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich⁸, but the drawing sold in 2006, though drastically cut down from its original format, served as the basis for a later portrait, dated 1537, now in the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds at Schloss Nymphenburg.⁹ There is no way of knowing whether the present drawing (which Löcher considered the most successful of the three) was made as the modello for another, lost portrait of Ottheinrich or was a rejected idea for the 1537 painting, but the existence in both drawn and painted form of a very similarly composed, frontal portrait of Ottheinrich’s wife, Susanna, rather suggests the former.  The painting of Susanna is in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, and the drawing is in the Koenigs Collection at the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.¹⁰ 

Of the other drawings of this type by Gertner, the most significant are the portrait of Friedrich, Markgraf von Brandenburg-Ansbach in the British Museum¹¹, those of Herzog Wilhelm IV von Bayern and his wife Maria Jacobaea, Markgräfin von Baden in the Louvre, studies for paintings of 1531¹², and the pair of images of Pfalzgraf Friedrich III and Maria Pfalzgräfin zu Brandenburg, both dated 1539, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, drawings that are distinguished both by the fact that the sitters’ hands, as well as their faces, are fully drawn, and by the more pictorial, contrasting background that the artist has placed behind their heads.¹³

Though this early 16^th-century portrait is very much a product of its time, its boldness and immediacy are also somehow very modern.  In superb condition, this outstanding example of Peter Gertner’s innovative drawing style bears witness both to the great abilities of this very talented and rare artist and to the cultured patronage of Ottheinrich von der Pfalz and his Wittelsbach court.   

1.  Löcher, op. cit., p. 5
2.  Idem, p. 14 
3.  Idem, pp. 32-33
4.  Three of the Bible’s eight volumes were acquired by the Bavarian State Library in 1950, and the remaining five in 2007, through the agency of Sotheby’s.
5.  S. Wagini, ‘Ottheinrichs Porträtgalerie in der “Runden Stube” des Schlosses Neuburg an der Donau’, PhD thesis, Munich University, 1987
6.  Löcher, op. cit., pp. 20-22
7.  Idem., p. 52, fig. 26, and p. 55, fig. 29, respectively; the latter sold, New York, Christie’s, 6 April 2006, lot 15
8.  Löcher, op. cit., p. 50, fig. 24
9.  Idem, p. 54, fig. 28
10.  Idem, pp. 46-47, figs. 21-22; Five Centuries of European Drawings, the Former Collection of Franz Koenigs, exh. cat., Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 1995-6, pp. 33, 143, no. 54
11.  London, The British Museum, Inv. 1949,0411.111
12.  Numbered 17 and 18; Paris, Louvre, inv. R.F. 11686 and 11685 respectively
13.  Washington, National Gallery of Art, inv. 1953.3.6 and 1953.3.7